It’s hard for me now to even think about all the different ways that I was a fish out of water when my preacher husband Biff and I moved to Japan to teach English. You’d be hard-pressed to find some additional ways than the ones I went through all at once. Not for nothing do people call what I experienced culture shock.
I once had an apartment in Sapporo… Sorry, I share with Betty White an unreasonable fondness for the movie Out of Africa. But that’s how I always think about my short time in Japan–this huge journey to another land, a journey that taught me quite a bit but which was, Read more
Macs are like Miatas in that they don’t ever tend to break, but when they do, they don’t really mess around. I’ll try to keep updating, but please be patient while I get stuff worked out. Not sure what’s going on, probably hard drive as I’ve ruled out most of Read more
Well, I officially have a diabetic cat now. He is about 12 years old, and he is huge and very affectionate and not terribly bright, this cat, and as white and pink as any 80s lithographed fantasy cat. And a few days ago he began flopping around like a walrus Read more
This is a love story, but it is not about another person. That would come later. This is a story about how I discovered a truth that somehow made its way into Christianity. This is how I discovered that why yes, perfect love does cast out fear.
Way back in the 1970s, a British Christian named Doreen Irvine wrote From Witchcraft to Christ. It was supposedly her “sensational true story of a woman rescued from Satan’s grasp by the power of God,” according to its tagline. And I’m sure you are already thinking about how accurate that Read more
There’s a longer post coming, but here’s a little sneaky-peek to get the party going, so you know where my headspace is when I talk about the Unequally Yoked Club. I’d been out of church for a while. I guess I was 24 or so. This was in Portland, after Read more
All this time, despite my misgivings about the very un-Christlike people in my church’s leadership and in my own little family, I spent a lot of time at the church, as one might expect. My mother’d been downright alarmed when she’d realized I was spending five out of every seven Read more
Today, let me show you one of the most devastating things that happened to me when I was Christian. It was how I discovered that my god didn’t mind at all if his followers represented him through lying in flagrantly dishonest ways. It was also how I discovered that one of the most important beliefs my church taught wasn’t true: Jesus didn’t transform people at all.
Now that I wasn’t involved in weird evangelical churches anymore, I blossomed at last in the late 80s. I discovered the Drama Club at school, slowly made normal friends, and tried to fit in. I got involved with a historical re-enactment group called the Society for Creative Anachronism and found Read more